The rise of the faux internet indie

By MICHAEL DWYER

February 8, 2007 — 11.00am

THE new indie dream is sexy and free. This week her name is Mia Rose. She was nobody when she opened her YouTube account in late December. Within three weeks she had more than 200,000 fans making her the "Most Subscribed (YouTube) Musician of all Time".

Even Rolling Stone knows her name. Actually, the American music magazine calls her "a disturbingly well-packaged 18-year-old singer-songwriter", which suggests they also know her game.

The pretty acoustic balladeer is the latest overnight sensation bridging the credibility gap between the independent bedroom and the Big Time. She seems too good to be true with her dark, silky hair tumbling over her guitar, her girl-next-door spark and her TV Idol voice (http://youtube.com/user/miaarose).

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That's because she was most likely signed, coached and groomed by management and marketing experts well before posting her latest videos about (surprise!) flying around the world negotiating with record companies.

Rose is one of the new generation of faux internet indies, acts that use social networking sites such as MySpace and YouTube to fabricate a groundswell of popular support as part of a carefully orchestrated debutante publicity campaign.

The new media marketing strategy is not a million pixels removed from the Idol model. It plays on the same romantic notion that any more or less talented nobody - say the Arctic Monkeys, Sandi Thom, Lily Allen or Lonelygirl15 - can fast-track their destiny online without the aid of the evil, old-school corporate entertainment hype machine.

In each of the above cases, the degree of backroom involvement by said machinery is almost irrelevant. Mia Rose is in Rolling Stone, on this page, in your head, on a flight to New York and on her way to fame and fortune. That's the self-fulfilling magic of the new indie dream. The new indie reality is rather different.

In a rented car outside Heathrow Airport, Melbourne-based Charles Caldas is fighting the fight the old-fashioned way. His first strategy as chief executive officer of Merlin - a new agency formed to represent thousands of independent music labels worldwide - involves legwork on a global scale.

Merlin is not as obviously sexy as Mia Rose but when its arrival was announced two weeks ago at France's international music industry conference, MIDEM, it was hailed as a potential revolution for indies seeking to distribute their music within the baffling, bullying new world of online digital download services.

Critics and insiders have even hailed it as a potential fifth major label, which raises age-old questions about the independence of independents that play by the same rules as majors. But Mr Caldas is sceptical, for starters, of the Arctic Monkeys-cum-Mia Rose magic-bullet model.

"The MySpace/YouTube phenomenon (lends itself) to aggressive self-marketing, whether it be your band or your label," he says. "If you so choose, you can be very aggressive in the early part of your career in giving away your music and making it easily accessible on the internet.

"The difficulty comes at the point when those copyrights maybe fall out of your direct control and start to be used to enhance other people's businesses. So monetising is a challenge, not for everyone, but certainly for the independent sector at the moment."

Until 18 months ago, Mr Caldas was the CEO of Shock Records in Melbourne, so he has a more grounded view of what it takes for an indie act to make it online - or anywhere else. He knows there are more sums to be done before any act gets near a decent bottom line.

"Historically, the independent sector has always been more progressive in terms of how it uses its (songs), particularly in new media," he says. It was indies who embraced early music subscription services such as eMusic with its unprotected MP3 format while major labels trembled, procrastinated and failed with cumbersome digital rights management technologies.

"(Indies) have leapt at those opportunities online," Mr Caldas says. "The flip side is what I call the behemoth, the massive companies that are really using music and intellectual copyright as a tool to run their own businesses."

He mentions Google's acquisition of YouTube, a classic instance of a technology corporation subsuming artistic content en masse. It's a new-century echo of the major-label monoliths that swallowed huge slabs of the international music market in the '90s. The same applies to Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of MySpace in July 2005.

With an estimated 88 per cent of the online music market, Apple's iTunes is a behemoth, but its 3 million songs are mostly licensed from the world's four major labels - Universal, Warner, Sony BMG and EMI. As with the waning indie record stores dotted around Melbourne, it's up to more discerning music fans to track down the other 20-plus million songs up for sale on smaller online services.

"Why do these big services do a deal with Universal first? Because it's up to 30 per cent of the world market in one transaction, with one conversation, one deal and one delivery point," Mr Caldas says. "The world's independent labels have an equal market share to Universal, but it's scattered among thousands of players."

Only a handful of these players - Beggars Banquet, Epitaph, Tommy Boy, Domino, Rough Trade, Cooking Vinyl - were sitting around the table in the French Riviera when Merlin was launched late last month. But a mere sample of their combined roster looks like this: Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand, the Strokes, Arcade Fire, Antony and the Johnsons, Tom Waits, Matchbook Romance, Pennywise, the White Stripes, Basement Jaxx, Cat Power, the Pixies, the Cult, TV on the Radio, Billy Bragg, Echo and the Bunnymen, Richard Thompson, Deep Purple and Jerry Lee Lewis.

Multiply this by thousands, and the Merlin umbrella will represent a mind-boggling wealth of music and powerful leverage when negotiating rights with the big online music services. So does Mr Caldas think the "fifth major" predictions ring true?

"No, because we won't be thinking like one," he says. "Independents are far more forward-thinking and far more open and aggressive in the way we believe copyright can be.

"We don't believe you should restrict access to music. Where (digital rights management) is used by major labels as a policing tool, we'd rather see it as an accounting tool, something that potentially tracks the use of your copyrights and assigns payment to them. DRM should not limit a kid's ability to legitimately transfer a file they've acquired from one player to another and use it in whatever environment he sees fit."

THIS philosophy signifies a fundamental difference between the major and indie mind-sets as they transfer their wares to the digital realm. As mentioned earlier, it was the fear of MP3 proliferation, with its lack of DRM encryption and potential ease of piracy, that delayed the major labels' entry to internet distribution in the '90s - arguably with disastrous consequences for them.

When Boston University student Shawn Fanning developed Napster, the first, infamous peer-to-peer file sharing service in 1999, the majors chose to sue, rather than embrace and adapt the new technology.

Last year, Mr Fanning launched SNOCAP, a company that provides "digital licensing and copyright management services" to independent artists seeking to sell their work online. The pitch? "Easily upload your music. Select the tracks you want to sell. Paste your store HTML on any website. Monitor your sales on a daily basis. Get paid on a monthly basis. You keep all the rights to your music."

Last September, SNOCAP announced it had made a deal with MySpace. In turn, the first deal Merlin signed was with SNOCAP. It was a significant indie incursion into the belly of the behemoth.

"I think SNOCAP is a perfect example where we've seen this new democracy of access to music in place," Mr Caldas says. "A lot of these bands on MySpace are bypassing all of the traditional models but again, it's very hard for a little label to go and negotiate a good, effective deal for themselves with a big player like SNOCAP and MySpace.

"Doing it centrally (through Merlin), creating a template that everyone can plug into, makes it far easier and it also means everybody is getting fair recompense for their copyright . . . what comes out of that for the consumer is hopefully enhanced as well because there's more stuff available and more interesting ways to discover new music."

Beyond the mainstream mall traffic of iTunes, Google/YouTube and Murdoch's MySpace lies a rich variety of online music stores. The staunchly indie-oriented eMusic subscription service is close to announcing its 100-millionth download, having amassed 2 million tracks from more than 13,000 independent labels since 1995.

Sydney-based musician and composer Charlie Chan has been selling her own music online since '92 (charliechan.com.au). About five years ago she developed a kind of precursor to SNOCAP, Martian Music, a platform that allows artists to deliver their own content online in return for a one-off administration and maintenance fee (martianmusic.com).

"They can configure it, they can price it, and they receive roughly 67 per cent of the income. SNOCAP is very late, and also it doesn't pay very well," she says.

"The one significant difference about Martian is in order to have a level field you have to have services that are fundamentally independent; independent of funding, independent of people's interference, independent of some sort of arbitrator of taste or content decision-making."

So continues the endless debate of true independence versus commercial compromise; struggling artistic autonomy versus the convenience of leaping into bed with the behemoth.

It's a fine line that new artists are exploring daily. For Queensland indie band Operator Please, it's been a case of a few tracks on MySpace one day; a fully paid major-label junket to New York the next (myspace.com/operatorplease).

Its internet buzz began five or six months ago. "I heard that they were only 16," Jerry Soer blogged on the Australian music site, Who the Bloody Hell Are They? "And I heard that a certain US major label is interested in them." He either heard right or perpetuated a handy myth. Tim Manton, of Scorpio Music, recalls the rapid-fire events like this:

"(Scorpio's) Rebekah Campbell called me on a Thursday and gave me the (MySpace) link. We flew to Brisbane on the Saturday to see them play. By Monday the industry had started to talk about it here and OS. We took on a great lawyer in the US. He then got seven major labels to pay for the band to showcase in New York.

"So I guess as a band they were just minding their business and all of a sudden they were in NYC. They (played) in NYC before they had played Melbourne. Pretty weird, really. When we picked them up they hadn't ever even rehearsed in a studio."

Operator Please has since signed with hip British indie Brille Records. The band's first release through Virgin EMI in Australia is near. Once again, it looks like that romantic online indie dream is coming true. But is Merlin's Charles Caldas a believer yet?

"Look, I think it would be fantastic, as a lover of music and a lover of this new (means of distribution)," he says. "But for true mass-market penetration of music, people need to have some assistance in terms of how they market it and how they are taken out into the broader public.

"While it's nice to be able to break some rules, the pure business fundamentals of how you harness and create demand are fairly established. People still listen to the radio, people still read magazines and they are still intensely fed by some very big publicity machines, and they cost money to run.

"In terms of having a hit as an independent within a particular genre, that is absolutely possible.

"If you're gonna take on the Christina Aguileras of this world on a global level, it's slightly tougher. It's a little more complicated than putting a few tracks on MySpace."